Monday, December 31

2007 was a year of living dangerously

By Christopher Booker

An image which summed up the surreal nature of 2007 as well as any other was a meeting in March of the European Council, at which Tony Blair and his 26 fellow heads of government decided, in the name of fighting global warming, to ban incandescent light bulbs.

From 2009 the only bulbs it will be legal to make or sell anywhere in the EU will be the so-called low-energy mercury bulbs known as Compact Fluorescent Lamps or CFLs.This may have made Mr Blair and his colleagues feel virtuous, but it was a completely crazy, quixotic gesture. They could not have taken any technical advice because their goal will prove impossible to achieve. CFLs may have a use in the right place, but up to half our light fittings are too enclosed to take them (a full conversion would take years, costing tens of billions of pounds).Their contribution to reducing global warming is derisory. And once these ugly bulbs are dead (often much sooner than advertised), thanks to another EU law which now outlaws the burial of mercury, they will be almost impossible to dispose of.

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As usual, many themes covered by my column in the Sunday Telegraph during the year have appeared more than once, to illustrate the increasing similarity of those who rule us to Don Quixote, the foolish knight who thought to save the world by charging a row of windmills with his lance, imagining them to be monstrous, planet-threatening giants.

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In the quixotic cause of fighting global warming, there is no end to the disasters we are now storing up for ourselves.

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Under an EU target which says that by 2020 10 per cent of all our petrol and diesel must be replaced with "biofuels", we are expected to devote at least 40 per cent of the farmland we currently use for food to growing crops which can beused for transport - just when there is a growing world food shortage and the price of grain has already doubled this year.

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Under another EU target, which says that by 2020 we must generate 20 per cent of our electricity from renewables, our Government plans to spend £50 billion on building 7,000 giant off shore windmills (not to mention the thousands more due to disfigure some of our most beautiful countryside). From these it claims it will be able to "power all the homes in Britain", oblivious of the fact that it will need up to 20 conventional power stations to provide power during the two-thirds of the time (averaged out) when there is insufficient wind to keep those windmills turning.

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Global warming also played a key part in yet another of the year's quixotic fiascos, the Home Information Packs which we were told would speed up the process of home-buying (billed here two years ago as "a disaster waiting to happen").

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When the predicted shambles duly arrived the Government was unable to abandon its folly, thanks to EU directive 2002/01 which, to combat global warming, compels all sellers to pay for an Energy Performance Certificate.In reality, the certificates have proved worthless. The testimony of recent homebuyers is that, far from speeding the process, HIPs significantly slow it down. Global warming was also mysteriously claimed as justification for the continuing shambles we have made of our waste disposal system, thanks to the EU's landfill directive which forces us to phase out landfilling our rubbish in favour of recycling.

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The result is that much of the waste nominally collected to meet EU recycling targets ends up either being shipped off to China or quietly landfilled when no one is looking

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Despite such hypocrisy, we are still so short of our EU-imposed targets that within two years we shall be paying £3 billion a year in ever-rising landfill tax and a further £200 million a year in fines to Brussels.

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Brussels was doubtless also grateful in 2007 for the £350 million it took off British taxpayers as a punishment for the ongoing shambles made by our Government of paying (or rather not paying) EU subsidies to English farmers.This was just part of the unending bureaucratic nightmare visited on farmers by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs - the perfect symbol of which was an escape of the foot and mouth virus from Defra's own laboratory at Pirbright.

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When Brussels then banned UK lamb exports worth £500 million, no compensation was offered by the Government despite it being entirely responsible for the disaster in the first place.

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Another longstanding scandal which belatedly attracted publicity in 2007 was the forced dumping of millions of tons of saleable fish under the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) quota system..

In March, the EU's fisheries commissioner, Joe Borg, called it "morally wrong" that, in some waters round the British Isles, fishermen must chuck more than 90 per cent of the fish they catch, dead, back into the sea. (In the English Channel, British fishermen are only allowed to land 8 per cent of the total cod quota, while their French competitors have 80 per cent.)But for all the handwringing of Brussels, and of Labour and Tory spokesmen, when this obscenity was again highlighted in December, the one thing none of them proposed was abolition of the quota system which makes this ecological catastrophe inevitable. Since this is a central principle of the CFP, the disaster must continue.

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Such is the way we are now governed, by smoke and mirrors. And to judge by the way that the EU shamelessly smuggled back its rejected constitution under another name - enabling Gordon Brown to kick off his premiership with a breathtaking falsehood and break his promise of a referendum - it seems we can expect even more of it in the future.When history comes to be written, however, 2007 may well be marked as the significant year when it first registered that the disaster-movie threat posed to the planet by global warming might not be roaring down on us quite as predicted

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As reported in August, the latest US satellite records show that, far fromcontinuing to rise in sync with CO2 emissions, global temperatures have in the past few years flattened out 0.2 degrees below their 1998 level.In June this year they were actually at a level below that reached in 1983. Couple this with the corrected figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 20th century's hottest decade was not the 1990s but the 1930s, and maybe those lights don't need to go out all over Europe after all.